A facile way to fabricate novel 2–3-type composites based on zinc powders and polyvinylidene fluoride with enhanced dielectric properties

This study describes a simple and low-cost method for fabricating novel 2–3-type composites composed of zinc flakes and polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) by direct wet ball-milling and hot-pressing of the mixture of raw zinc powders and PVDF powders in alcohol. It is interesting that zinc spherical powders can be changed into 2-dimensional zinc flakes in the ball-milling and parallel oriented in the polymer under the following hot-pressing process. The composites are demonstrated to have significantly higher dielectric constants than those of bulk zinc/PVDF composites, with quite low dielectric loss and good thermal stability. A mechanism of parallel-board microcapacitor is proposed to explain the relationship of microstructure and dielectric properties.